Steve Jobs once said that people didn’t know what they wanted until they had something on their hands.
I agree with it.
However, if you enforce it 100%, you would overlook what market wants.
Other companies’ attitude on customer relationship is that customers are Kings.
Well, I agree with that, too.
But if you enforce it 100%, your products will lose its product identity and philosophy that make your products stand up in the wild forest of products from this and that companies.
Professional people ( not prosumers ) have their idea on products they use. They want features they realize that it is good to have after using a product.
So, as the author of a blog post , X vs. Pro, pointed out, they should work with professional users expecting feedbacks. If a company, Apple, overlook that, they would have hard time to survive in the market. They may not want the small niche, but important market.
In tech industry, WOW factor is really important. WOW factor means “something which makes people say “wow!!”. (It’s marketing term.)
So, let’s say their flag ship in Mac line is Mac Pro. The revenue Mac Pro take a part of may not be as big as iMac, MacBook, and other lower end machines. However, because of their power, people are attracted to Mac platform and buy cheaper or lower end models. Well, nowadays, WOW factor of Apple is not how powerful a machine is. It’s about good the usability is.
However, still it’s a tech company. Any “Ease-of-Use” can’t persuade people always.
As a person ( in the reply ) pointed out, I wonder how many “enthusiasts” will support Apple if they are down in the future again.
For many years, I have seen the rise of Apple due to iPhone.
It was nice tactic to introduce HTML based development than its native Objective-C/Cocoa development for iPhone. However, after that there are many “Objective-C/Cocoa” programmers bloomed. I know there are new many excellent programmers out there. However, because of the popularity of iPhone/iOS, it is also true that unqualified people take a position and they roar like lions.
I saw many source codes, of which writers insist that it is Obj-C/Cocoa program, but I easily could see that they didn’t understand the philosophy of Obj-C/Cocoa and just produces codes.
Xcode 4 has the same problem to Final Cut Pro X.
They axed good working environment and made it Visual Studio.
I have used Visual Studio for more than 10 years. I’m a Windows programmer also.
I remember that Project Builder was horrible, and initial Xcode was bad and confusing especially in terms of project settings. I remember that its “How this should work” stabilized from Xcode 2.4 or something like that. Xcode 3 was very good until they started to push iOS SDK without fixing bugs in Xcode 3. However, I expected that they would solve Xcode 3’s bugs when iOS SDK is stabilized.
However, instead they introduced Xcode 4. Although you can still download Xcode 3 for the Snow Leopard, but you have to use Xcode 4 someday. Xcode 4 has very inefficient workflow and wastes lots of screen real estate. ( which makes you buy a bigger monitor )
Although I like some part of Visual Studio, I don’t like its “captivated in one main frame” thing. Fortunately MS started to evacuate their “panes” to outside of the main frame with recent versions of Visual Studio. It means you can put your “watch” or “memory viewer” pane to your second monitor while the mainframe of Visual Studio is on your first monitor.
MS tried Apple-way with Visual Studio, but Apple tried MS-way with Xcode 4.
It is very funny.
Also, it is very interesting that many of Apple products have the same direction nowadays.
Who influenced that? is it one of the reason Bertrand Serlett left ( can’t agree with the new direction? )
I don’t know what happened internally. It will be good if somebody share their internal view.
By the way, please read X vs. Pro. It is good to understand what is happening now.
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